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7/31/2009

Fridays

I got reading some of Holly Lisle's terrifyingly extensive online notes on writing and came away with something that seemed like a good idea; regardless of what you're working on, if you've got a dream project you want to work on for which there's no prospect of a contract, give yourself one day a week to work on it. I'm running on memory here because I've lost the original link, but as I recall Holly mentioned being initially concerned by the idea of doing this for the same reason it worried me, in that you can end up distracted from what you should really be doing, ie working on stuff you're reasonably sure you might get paid for. But apparently it made her more productive on her other output as well, so I'm going to give it a try. There's a couple of ideas I have I'd like to put together, and now that I'm sitting down and writing them up for the first time (Friday being my chosen day), it's feeling good.

I mentioned a while back I was going to redesign the website. That's done, but first I have to figure out how to set up some file formats for downloadable stuff. I've taken excerpts from all the books and tried setting them up in different ebook formats, but this has proven more difficult than I hoped it might be. I'm doing the same for two short stories, The Ranch, which has been up for a while, and another story related to my first novel first published in Interzone way back when. They're fine in .rtf and Sony Reader format, but anything else like .epub just seems to be jinxed. But once I've sorted them out - or rather, when I've had the time to sort them out - they'll go live along with the rest of the redesign.

Hi Bob - it's a really neat app, but most people in my experience are going to take the easier route either of reading straight from the webpage or possibly downloading a sample or short story onto either an ebook device or something like an iphone or other handheld device. On the other hand, it's something to look into, so thanks for that link.